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worse, hearing bones snap before a man was flung into the sea, too injured to stay afloat for long or even swim toward another ship, but too close to the tentacles for anyone to risk trying to save him.
    Because every time they had tried to save a man, another ship was lost.
    So the survivors sailed back to the village, knowing they were leaving men to die. And the pain of that, the shame of it, smeared their hearts with so much hurt that the darkness of their grief seeped through the bedrock that protected their village, staining everything until a man only had to think of the possibility of bad luck to have it come true.

Chapter Five
    M errill fingered the silver cuff bracelet on her wrist as she stared at the stone that formed a natural, shallow basin. The Sisters filled the basin with water every morning for the birds. Brighid, their leader until she had abandoned them sixteen years ago, had found the stone and designed this little contemplation corner around it.
    But Merrill hadn't come for contemplation this morning. She had come to let her heart speak to the Light as eloquently as it could. She needed help. They all needed help.
    Help me find a way to protect the Light. Please, help me find a way.
    Pulling the cuff bracelet off her wrist, she placed it in the shallow basin. Since it had been a gift from Brighid, she valued it more than any other possession. Giving it up seemed a sacrifice worthy of the help she sought.
    Not that she really believed her prayers or a bracelet would make any difference.
    Turning away from the basin before she changed her mind and took back the bracelet, she returned to the terrace that overlooked the gardens behind Lighthaven's sprawling manor. For forty years she had lived in the manor and walked through these gardens. She had been born here on the White Isle, had spent the first years of her life in Atwater, the seaport village that acted as a portal to the rest of the world. The day after her tenth birthday, her father brought her to Lighthaven and left her with the Sisters of Light in the hopes that she would become one of them.
    She had lived nowhere else since, had known no other place. She had rarely traveled beyond the boundaries of Lighthaven m all the years that had passed since that girl had stood at the visitors' gate and felt her heart soar at the sound of women's voices raised in a ritual song. She didn't regret the innocence that came from the lack of worldly experience. She wasn't completely ignorant of what lay beyond the shores of this island — the world brushed against the White Isle often enough — but those things had never touched her, leaving her heart a pure vessel for the Light.
    Now she wondered if that ignorance would doom everyone and everything she cared about.
    "If the gardens give you no peace," said a voice behind her, "do they give you answers?"
    Merrill turned to look at her closest friend. Shaela never spoke of her life before coming to Lighthaven, had never once revealed what had driven a girl on the cusp of womanhood to steal a rowboat and try to make her way across the strait that separated the White Isle from Elandar. She had never said what had caused the blindness in her left eye or the slight paralysis of the left side of her face or the lameness in one leg.
    There were scars on Shaela's body that the years had faded but couldn't erase completely. And there were scars on her heart that would never fade.
    Because of that, there was always a shadow of Dark inside Shaela, but that shadow made her value the Light even more than the Sisters who had never been touched by evil.
    "I feel the chill of winter," Merrill said, turning back to look at the garden. "I dread the cold days and long nights that are coming because I can't stop wondering if we'll ever see the spring."
    Shaela sighed, an exasperated sound. "You've been chewing on this for over a month. You've been over the old records again and again and found nothing."
    "I found the old stories.